Prisons, Overcrowding and the Place of Justice Reinvestment
Tuesday 3 February 2015 @ 1.13 p.m. | Crime
With the recent elections in NSW, VIC and QLD, much of the focus from incoming and outgoing governments is on being "tough on crime". However, as a recent ABS study shows, the Australian prison population has hit a 10-year high and some experts have expressed concerns about the consequences of overcrowding in prison populations.
Overcrowded Prisons - What is the Issue?
A number of reports, most recently Victorian and NSW crime statistics, show crime rates are falling. However, disproportionately, the prison population has increased. For example, in Victoria, there were 11.9% more offenders imprisoned compared with the same period last year. This has subsequent consequences for public resources and social outcomes of imprisonment.
The Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) senior lawyer Ruth Barson described the trend as “alarming” and has called on the government to consider alternatives to imprisonment:
“We’re not in the grip of a crime wave that’s driving up our prison population; it’s misguided and heavy-handed law and order policies that are putting more strain on our prison systems and requiring ever increasing amounts of money.”
And as Sarah Hopkins, from The Conversation states:
"Let’s be clear: there are people who need to be separated from society, but we need to look at who ends up in prison and why. Only then can we start to change this costly game where only the prison industry companies win. And when we do look at who fills our prisons we see the over-representation of Aboriginal people, people with drug problems, people with disabilities, the mentally ill, disadvantaged and homeless."
A Possible Solution? Justice Reinvestment
The common factor for these prisoners, as suggested by Sarah Hopkins:
"apart from poverty and limited opportunities – is the availability of more effective and much more inexpensive responses than prison. What prisons offer these offenders are high re-offending rates, unprepared release back into the community and poor impacts on community safety."
The Castan Centre for Human Rights also reorients the analysis with a human rights focus:
"Prisoners are entitled[sic] to human rights, as humans. They do not need to plead for special compassion or consideration...There is still an argument that people lose their ‘human rights’ by committing crime. In the old days it was said the prisoners/felons suffered ‘civil death’. This means that they lost their civil rights upon conviction. Essentially, all rights were lost, other than rights which a government could choose to give. By contrast, in recent years the official position is that prisoners do in fact retain all rights ‘other than those inevitably lost by reason of their incarceration’."
One suggestion that has been put forward is that of justice reinvestment, an approach that has delivered positive results in the United States and involves channeling funding into community-based services aimed at addressing the underlying causes of offending and preventing re-offending in the long-term. Justice reinvestment also re-aligns taxpayers’ dollars by diverting some of the funds spent on incarceration to communities that have a high concentration of offenders.
Barson continues:
“We know that community-based sentencing options can work better than prison and we know that early intervention is more effective and far less costly...Money spent outside of prisons on social services would go a long way as it helps prevent certain crimes from occurring in the first place.”
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